Joseph L. Mahoney

Joseph Mahoney Studies Impact of Out-of-School Time on Children and Youth's Development

Irvine, Calif., April 1, 2008

Joseph L. Mahoney, Ph.D., joined the Department of Education as an Associate Professor on July 1, 2007. Trained as a developmental psychologist, his research focuses on social/educational development for school-age children and adolescents. In recent years, his research has been concerned with the developmental consequences related to how young people spend their out-of-school time.

Prof. Mahoney earned his B.S. from the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota in 1993 and his Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the Center for Developmental Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1997. He completed post-doctoral training from the Psychological Institute at Stockholm University in 1999. Prior to joining the faculty at UCI, Prof. Mahoney served on the faculty at Yale University where he was a professor from 1999-2007. There he directed the Yale Study of Children's After-school Time, the Social Policy and Intervention Laboratory (with E. Zigler), and was a faculty member at the Edward Zigler Center for Social Policy and Child Development.

Prof. Mahoney is a recipient of the Public Policy Award from the Smith Richardson Foundation, a past member of the National Academy of Science's Committee on Family and Work Policies, and co-authored the resulting volume Working Families and Growing Kids (2003). He was the main editor of the volume Organized Activities as Contexts of Development (with R. Larson and J. Eccles) released in 2005, and has served on the National Advisory Board for the Horizons National summer enrichment program since 1999. In 2006 he received a Senior Faculty Fellowship from Yale University and in 2007 he was appointed by the Governing Council of SRCD (Society for Research in Child Development) to a four-year appointment of service with the organization's Policy and Communications Committee. Prof. Mahoney also serves as an editorial board member for both the Journal of Research on Adolescence and Applied Developmental Science and is a currently Guest Editor for a special edition of the American Journal of Community that focuses on after-school programming.

Prof. Mahoney's is currently involved in three research projects. One project involves continuing analyses of the Yale Study of Children's After-school Time. This four-year longitudinal study of 651 school-age children (Grades 1-3 at baseline) has been supported by grants from the NICHD and the Smith Richardson Foundation. Most of the study participants live in poverty and are Hispanic or African American. A central aim of this project is to understand how the ecology of children's after-school arrangements (e.g., after-school programs, parent care, relative care, self care) relates to the development of social, academic, and physical health.

Beginning this Spring, a second project is the study of Consequences of Summertime for Adolescent Development. This is a new project supported by a 2-year grant from the NICHD. As the project title suggests, the study aim is to understand the associated consequences of summertime for adolescent development. Summertime constitutes about 23% of the calendar year for school-aged youth. It also represents the longest consecutive period of out-of-school time. However, less than 1% of published studies over the past 40 years has been concerned with summer and, as a result, very little is known about how youth spend the summer months or the possible of impact of this time use for adolescents' academic, social, and physical development during school year. Findings from this study should begin to fill the knowledge gap in these areas and specify the risks and opportunities of summertime for adolescent development.

A final project concerns the development of a new After-school Certificate Program (ASCP). Although Departments of Education have always provided training for instruction that takes place during the school day, very few institutions of higher learning offer formal education to those who direct the educational opportunities that occur in after-school programs. Through the provision of both coursework in the classroom at UCI and fieldwork at local after-school program sites, students earning a certificate in this program will gain the knowledge and skills important for developing high quality programming. Such programming is thought to facilitate the positive development of children and adolescents during the hours following school dismissal. To evaluate this proposal, an ongoing evaluation of the impacts of the ASCP is also planned.

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